How Columbia’s Professors Fomented Hostility to Israel

The latest report from Columbia University’s internal task force on antisemitism calls to mind Abraham’s plea for Sodom and Gomorrah. The report confirms that Columbia’s was no spontaneous student uprising. It documents how anti-Jewish discrimination pervaded Columbia’s classrooms and brings into focus a more troubling reality: Hostility to the Jewish state was fomented by the very professors entrusted to educate students. The 70-page document marks the task force’s fourth and final report on antisemitism and builds on previous examinations of the university’s handling of demonstrations, its campus culture, and its students’ feelings of belonging and exclusion. Together, they offer an account of how Jewish and Israeli students were socially ostracized by their peers and abandoned by their administration in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack.This final report examines how anti-Jewish discrimination permeated the “classroom experience at Columbia.” Drawing on testimonies from hundreds of Jewish and Israeli students, it brings to light how Columbia’s ideologically skewed academic environment, combined with an unbridled activist-minded faculty, allowed the Ivy League school’s classrooms to transform into anti-Israel echo chambers.The institutional nature of the problem is laid bare in the task force’s finding that Columbia “lacks full-time tenure line faculty expertise in Middle East history, politics, political economy and policy that is not explicitly anti-Zionist.” This imbalance has made it nearly impossible for students to find an “academic perspective” that “treats Zionism as legitimate” rather than “a perspective that treats it as illegitimate.”The report also cites several disturbing accounts of instructors singling out Jewish or Israeli students because of their perceived ties to Israel, a practice that the task force notes violates guidance from the Department of Education. In one instance, an Israeli student was told by a professor that the student “must know a lot about settler colonialism” before being asked: “How do you feel about that?” Another Israeli student said she was called an “occupier.”Remarkably, anti-Israel bias extended even to courses completely unrelated to the Middle East. One instance cited in the report involves an introductory astronomy class, which featured an opening unit entitled “Astronomy in Palestine.” The professor framed it as necessary because “as we watch genocide unfold in Gaza, it is also important to tell the story of Palestinians outside of being the subjects of a military occupation,” the syllabus noted.At Columbia’s school of public health, one instructor overseeing a 400-person class condemned three Jewish university donors for “laundering blood money” and referred to Israel as “so-called Israel.” The task force heard similar reports of students being blindsided by harsh condemnations of Israel in a photography class, an architecture class, courses on nonprofit management, film, music humanities, and Spanish.These findings vindicate the Columbia affiliates that have raised the alarm on this head since the height of the anti-Israel encampment movement, and also long before. Columbia’s Jewish Alumni Association diagnosed the problem in June 2024, proclaiming that a “staff overhaul” would be necessary to address the school’s antisemitism, which they described as “a regular, defining feature of life on Columbia University’s campus.”The following summer Columbia agreed to implement several significant reforms as part of a settlement with the Trump administration to restore millions of dollars in federal funding. Since then, the campus has been relatively quiet. Yet the arrival of this report prompted the same alumni group to observe that “the antisemitic mayhem on campus may have been reined in — but the faculty who supported and encouraged it have not.” Which brings us back to Abraham’s plea for Sodom and Gomorrah. The patriarch bargained with God, asking if those cities might be spared for the sake of 50 righteous men, then 45, then 30, and eventually down to 10. Yet even 10 could not be found, and the cities were destroyed. Columbia’s task force conducted its own search. The question now is whether the university will act on what it discovered.

How Columbia’s Professors Fomented Hostility to Israel

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